Emergency response training is a critical task in modern security and law-enforcement applications where any moment of duty may include experiencing and dealing with the consequences of an emergency event such as a natural disaster, industrial accident, military activity, security related activity, etc. A responder's ability to effectively respond to a given scenario is determined in no small part based on the responder's previous experience with observing and/or engaging similar scenarios. Accordingly, it is of great benefit for a given responder to be trained using experiences and observations that mimic, as closely and realistically as possible, the experience to which the responder would be exposed while responding to an actual emergency event.
For some types of emergency event, it is very difficult to accurately simulate conditions that would be experienced during an actual emergency event due to many factors, not least of which includes safety of the training personnel and/or environmental safety. For example, it would obviously be disadvantageous to release harmful or deadly materials into a training environment generally, and particularly disadvantageous to expose trainees to harmful materials in the course of training.
In the case of many biological and radioactive materials, the situation is even more severe because access to the material(s) of interest is either severely limited or forbidden altogether, foreclosing any possibility of conducting training exercises using the restricted materials. The effectiveness of training would likely be severely undermined using surrogates for the actual materials that would necessarily be introduced into the training scenario thus detracting from the training objectives by introducing artificialities.
Moreover, many conventional emergency response techniques and systems utilize surrogate sources in connection with an emergency event. The presence of surrogate sources reduces overall fidelity of exercises and therefore the effectiveness of the training. The simulated emergency response is accordingly less representative of actual emergency events and responses, reducing the overall value of the simulation.
Accordingly, it would be beneficial to provide training capabilities based on actual instrumentation systems, techniques, and associated computer generated information designed to conduct, facilitate, and/or enable realistic simulation of emergency event scenarios that are free from the usual constraints imposed by regulations restricting the possession and use of dangerous materials involved with an actual emergency event to be simulated. It would also be beneficial to increase the capacity to conduct such training currently limited by above mentioned costs and safety/security measures.
It would be further beneficial to provide a platform for conducting and/or modifying the simulations in real-time or near real-time to accurately represent one or more unique experiences of individual(s) taking part in the simulated exercise. It would be especially useful for the unique experiences of the individuals participating in the simulated exercise to substantially represent conditions that would be experienced during an actual emergency event of similar or identical nature and/or characteristics.